3 ms·
Snake oil. Just ask the model, all these custom agents/skills haven't proven that useful in practice.
by behnamoh 4mo ago
Snake oil. Just ask the model, all these custom agents/skills haven't proven that useful in practice.
- beezlewax 4mo agoI've found them useful for in house stuff where you are using a specific design system or architecture. But custom everything works best. Are that Claude works well on its own though at this point.
- john_strinlai 4mo agonot that i know much about the effectiveness of these skill files, i find it odd to call something given for free "snake oil", which i thought referred to the sale of fraudulent products (to the benefit of the snake oil salesperson), typically around healthcare-related stuff.
- jw1224 4mo agoSkills already are "just asking the model". Unless you'd prefer to type out the same instructions every single time? Skills are literally just Markdown documents that get loaded into context when the /skill-name is invoked.
- Zetaphor 4mo agoI think they're maybe confusing Skills and MCP servers
- dominotw 4mo agoi belive gp means llms produce what they see in training data/rl there isnt much too much customization you can do with skills. they are being sold as more powerful than they are. Like llms are intelligent blank slates that can be customized with mere markdown files.
- calebkaiser 4mo agoI don't understand this line of criticism exactly. By putting new information in the context window, you are materially changing the activations at your point of sampling, which is literally "customizing with mere markdown files." Taken to the extreme, the attitude that there is some special incantation that will unlock all capabilities is silly, and a lot of the "prompt engineering" discourse is similarly kind of dumb, but in-context learning is clearly a real thing.
- dominotw 4mo agoeven if that works one time you can never be sure that your customization is in place or fell out of context's important zone or is contradicted by later context . you've reverted back to base llm behavior. you are treating skill like sure thing
- krupan 4mo agoIt's as of people crave some sort of control and/or determinism from these chaotic tools, and so they have to believe that these "skills" make a difference
- coffeeaddict1 4mo agoI disagree. Not all skills are useless. For example, I sometime use Qt for GUI projects and I have found their skills [0] very useful to improve the quality and performance of my projects. I their absence, I would each time have to direct the agents to find the docs or specific tools, wasting tokens and thus decreasing the quality of the output. [0] https://github.com/TheQtCompanyRnD/agent-skills https://github.com/TheQtCompanyRnD/agent-skills
- pramodbiligiri 4mo agoI don't think the idea of skills is quite snake oil. It seems you can change what LLM outputs next by what's called few-shot prompting or in-context learning: https://www.promptingguide.ai/techniques/fewshot https://www.promptingguide.ai/techniques/fewshot
- wyre 4mo agoYa, if im constantly asking a model to do TDD development, you know what would make it a lot easier? A skill.
- theptip 4mo agoNah. Skills are great. But you should write your own.
- internet101010 4mo agoLol wut. One of first things people do at a company when they get enterprise LLM tools is share a skill with company-specific color palettes or standards for creating visualizations (I prefer Tufte's principles).